Ms. Pop Feminist has, as always, an interesting take on the Bitch magazine “bailout,” which sounds so much stranger after the rash of bailouts of the financial sector. She makes excellent points about the way the campaign was conducted, the nature of print, and the nature of the Web, and I wrote her a small novel in return, which I’m reprinting here, since it was giant, and rather interesting.
As always, I love you for your willingness to put shit out there.
And here, you’re absolutely right.
The death of old media is in part the death of our need to be talked at. I say this with three print copies of The Nation next to me (home of several of my fave “public intellectuals,” including Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich).
A friend and I were discussing the lack of liberal public intellectuals a few weeks back. It was in the context of television and how well the conservative movement has done in funding think tanks and providing “experts” for television.
But especially in the feminist movement, you’re quite right that the desire to conserve print is the desire to conserve some form of authority. One that we simply don’t need.
Blogging is not journalism, but neither, for the most part, is what Bitch does. It’s also opinion writing.
The largest problem that I can see with the move to the Web is that it is harder to monetize. Much as I hate the word, the fact remains that Virginia Woolf’s argument from “A Room of One’s Own” remains true. I’m broke, I have to work to make a living, and that leaves me less time for actual journalism, blogging, reading, research, and creative work. If I cannot make money doing any of those things, then I have to find another way.
But rather than clinging to print as the last way we can make money (sort of) as writers and therefore dedicate ourselves to being if not public intellectuals, at least stimulators of the discourse (yeah, that sounds pretentious too, but I can’t think of a better word), we need to be figuring out how we can make a living as writers and artists in a world that gets its media primarily over the Web.
I agree. Creativity should not equal poverty. You should be able to feed yourself and your family off something creative, in your example writing and journalism.
The whole bloggers vs Main Stream Media (old print journalism) battle is most visibly being playing out across the sports landscape. It will be sad to see a world without newspapers and magazines but it is the world we are heading toward. Nothing can be done to stop it. We do however need to save the craft of journalism on all fronts. And that means people need to be able to earn a good living from it. Capitalism in and of itself is not bad.
I agree with Pip that capitalism in and of itself is not bad. In fact, it’s very good! Limiting our discussion to “the death of print media”, what’s happening here is consumers (in this case of information), have spoken– they desire a better media, a more interactive, more diverse, more dynamic, more responsive media than the pedantic pages of the economist or the new york times (though, again, for the high quality print media giants, I believe enough consumers will rally to keep the great ones in the game). This forces the thought producers, like Sarah here, to think critically about how to innovate new forms of though production. It’s not just the “death of print media” but a renaissance and a free-for-all for those scrappy intellectual entrepreneurs to leap ahead and improve the entire landscape.
I think feminist forums are the IDEAL space for this thought production to happen (as my post explains further). Let’s keep writing about this m’dear! Here’s an article you may like: http://www.reason.com/news/show/130948.html
Well, I might argue on the inherent goodness or evil of capitalism, but right now it’s the system I live under, and I’ve got to eat.
The interesting thing is that just the publications you mentioned are the ones whose audiences are actually growing. The Economist is the one magazine aside from tabloids that’s actually picking up subscribers, and The Times has more viewers now than ever before.
Blogging can replace commentary very easily. What it has a hard time doing is original reporting. Occasionally a blog breaks a story, but more often they’re commenting on reporting done by a news service.
What I think we need are far more nonprofit news sources. Which of course still pay people for their work, but are actually dedicated to the content above the money.
Which if you think about it, is why the blogosphere works: it’s driven by passions, not by cash. People do their best work when they love it AND get paid for it–or,as Virginia Woolf noted, are rich enough that they don’t need to be paid.